Reigo: King of the Sea Monsters (2008)

Reigo: King of the Sea Monsters (2008)
aka: Reigo: The Deep Sea Monster vs. the Battleship Yamato; Deep Sea Monster Reigo
Original Title: 深海獣レイゴー
Translation: Deep Sea Beast Reigo

Starring: Taiyo Suguira, Yukijiro Hotaru, Miyavi Matsunoi (as Mai Manami), Yumiko Hayashi, Mickey Curtis, Susumu Kurobe, Yoji Tanaka
Director: Shinpei Hayashiya

In late 2023, Toho Studios in Japan released Godzilla Minus One, a fresh take on the familiar formula that set Godzilla’s initial rampage in the first years after World War II and Japan’s ignominious defeat. The film was an acknowledgement of the Japanese military’s mistakes during that war, not to mention a reminder that the A-bomb strikes were not the only horrors inflicted on Japanese civilians by the American military. Two of the film’s four major monster set pieces were set entirely at sea, inviting comparisons between the film and Jaws. Godzilla Minus One was a worldwide box office hit and won G’s first Oscar for Best Special Effects, something the Legendary films couldn’t pull off with 10X the budget.

The WW2 setting, while novel, was done once before—to my knowledge—in Shinpei Hayashiya’s low-budget Reigo: King of the Deep Sea Monsters, one of a number of indie kaiju films that popped up to keep the genre (barely) afloat during the decade that separated Godzilla: Final Wars and Godzilla (2014). Sadly, a novel setting and interesting premise are torpedoed by the film’s low budget, which gives us 80 minutes of CGI that might have passed muster in a 90s-era Playstation game. The film was a labor of a love by a man who loved the genre, but the entire project has budgetary overreach written all over it.

The movie opens with some documentary footage of the Japanese navy and some variety of explanation about the Yamato-class battleship. The general idea is that for a few decades following the Russo-Japanese War, there was a non-aggression/disarmament pact between Japan, Great Britain and the United States. That pact expired in 1936, and Japan refused to take part in the then London Accords. By 1937, it was already developing the infamous Yamato-class battleship, the star in Japan’s navy. We're then treated to a minute or two of stock underwater footage before being given a glimpse of a giant monster lurking in the depths.

The story proper where an older man and his 40-ish wife are going to a shrine of sorts. She's pregnant and he's about to ship off for adventure on the high seas. The man is Naboru Osako (Yukijiro Hotaru, who was the inspector in the 90s Gamera movies) and he's the artillery officer on the Yamato. We also meet the young Takeshi Kaido (Ultraman Cosmos' Taiyo Sugiura, who sports a haircut that makes him look like a short-haired woman) who's dating a young lady named Chie (Miyavi Matsunoi, of Venus in Eros and 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy). They walk along the beach and talk about how much she’ll miss him, before they trip and Takeshi falls on top of her...how convenient. We then have a brief moment of Takeshi and his grandmother sharing a last meal before he ships off.

Once on board the Yamato, Naboru decides that fidelity is optional for a man who might die at any moment and shacks up with some random island girl who boards the ship with her grandfather. Before Naboru can get make mad monkey love to the girl (played by adult video queen Yumiko Hayashi, who showed up in films with names like Mother and Daughter: Spit Swapping Seduction), her grandfather tells some story about a dragon named Reigo haunting the sea near the island. That can't possibly be a plot point, can it?

A few days later, the sailors spot a pair of strange lights beneath the surface of the sea, which I assume is the filmmakers' homage to Gappa, the Triphibian Monster. They fire some depth charges at it and end up killing themselves a young Reigo monster, although they don't realize it at the time. The next evening or so, they find an American sailor floating in the water, which is some random excuse for some humor involving the English language. You got me. The sailor, Norman Melville (Mickey Curtis, of Gunhed and Kamikaze Taxi) is thrown in the brig and forgotten until the film's climax, when he helps the Japanese soldiers kill Reigo.

Shortly after that, the Yamato is attacked by a school of "Bonefish," which sort of look like the lovechild of Monster X (from Godzilla: Final Wars) and a barracuda. Several sailors are dismembered before the bonefish return to the sea, never to show up in the movie again. The grandfather explained that the bonefish are the harbinger of Reigo. From here on out, the film will mostly be about Japanese men screaming at each other, while the adult Reigo shows up on occasionally to ram a ship in the fleet and blow it up. Reigo is a cool and calculating beast who likes his victims to suffer, since a real kaiju assault would go like Godzilla vs. Biollante, in which the entire fleet is destroyed in a couple of minutes. This goes on until the 70-minute mark, when the sailors flood the bulkheads (or whatever part of the ship that you can intentionally flood), causing the Yamato to tilt to the side, which aligns the huge 18-inch guns with Reigo's chest and allows them to blow a hole in its torso, killing it.

You'd think the movie would end at that point, but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. The next seven minutes consist of a bizarre epilogue in which we learn that all of the main characters were eventually killed in 1945, when the Yamato was sunk in real life. This epilogue is accompanied by visuals that the characters were resurrected as kabuki disciples of the famous Japanese warrior monk Benkei. The end. Yeah, I couldn't figure that part out, either.

The first time I watched this about a decade ago, I watched it without subtitles. It was a huge slog for me then. Watching it a second time, I can state outright that the film is a huge slog for me. The monster sequences were short and scant, so most of the movie was made up of people standing around and talking. After all, talk is cheap and action costs money. But the direction of the human scenes is so flat and lifeless that I finally understood what "flat and lifeless direction" actually meant. It is basically the Japanese equivalent of a Mega Shark film.

The film was directed by former comedian and monster fan Shinpei Hayashiya, who had also directed the unofficial sequel to the 90s Gamera series, Gamera 4: Truth. Wait a minute? Former comedian-turned-monster movie director? Where have I heard that before? Oh right, Ray Shim, who directed Reptilian and D-War. Now there's a dependable recipe for a cinematic disaster. Anyway, we understand that Hayashiya had limited funds to work with, but his idea of filming the non-monster scenes is to set up the camera up in one place and leave it there for the duration of the scene, which is often several minutes. The lack of any sort of real camerawork or editing makes the movie feel even longer than it is, so that a 70-minute movie feels about as long as the American Godzilla film is.

With regards to the monsters, I have to say that I like Reigo's look. It was designed by Keita Amemiya, best known around these parts for directing the Zeiram/Zeram films and a few Tokusatsu series. The monster model used in some scenes was sculpted by Tomoo Haraguchi, who did special FX work on the live-action adaptation of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis. The quality of the monster model work is about on the same level of those puppet scenes in the original Godzilla film. The rest of the action (i.e. the monster, the battleship, etc.) is realized via CGI that's on the level of the Godzilla toy commercials from the mid-1990s that I used to see while watching weekday afternoon cartoons. It's really sad. The only monster scene that comes close to working is the death of Reigo, which looks kinda cool. Reigo doesn't have much in the way of powers, accept that he's apparently a living lightning rod, since lightning strikes his body every time he comes to the surface, even when there are no clouds in the sky!

So yeah, this movie is only for the most rabid fan of Japanese daikaiju cinema, what with its boring human scenes, lack of suspense and drama, and bargain-basement CGI effects. You'll easily find more entertainment Googling the film and looking at the pictures, imagining your own film with the monster, than watching this.